This is cohesion?

I’m reading Nicholas Wade’s book The Faith Instinct. The core of his claim is that religion is part of human nature and that it has evolved because it helps people survive because it fosters group cohesion. He argues that belief in supernatural agents who are watching and will punish wrong-doing and cheating is a powerful way to enforce group norms and that this is very useful for survival, especially in primitive societies without secular mechanisms for law enforcement.

Not wholly new, and not wholly mad. But – I have to wonder. CNN last night was showing UN trucks in Porte-au-Prince trying to distribute food, and what I kept seeing was a lot of men pushing each other and shoving their way to the front and grabbing for the food. ‘No women,’ I kept saying; ‘no women, no women; it’s all men; it’s all pushing and grabbing and men, there are no women. Maybe the men are taking the food back to women and children…’ But the reporters said they weren’t. The reporters said the men were pushing everyone aside and grabbing the food, and children and women were getting nothing. They said it was not a good situation.

Okay. We keep hearing how extremely religious Haiti is – and how crap its infrastructure is, so it must be badly in need of these watchful supernatural agents who motivate people to do the right thing. Okay – then why are the men pushing aside everybody who’s less strong than they are, and grabbing all the food they can grab? What kind of cohesion has religion bestowed on Haiti if that’s how things are? I can’t help wondering.

24 Responses to “This is cohesion?”

On the one hand, you can’t expect a nation that has a history of precariousness, and in addition has been torn apart by a major catastrophe, to display cohesion of any sort. In that sense it’s not a fair litmus test.

On the other hand, I guess your point is that you’d start to see social-ish things beginning to emerge if there were a religious instinct and it did have that cohesive disposition. That’s a very fair point.

I would find more promise in looking at the full functions of theology using a Kohlberg-esque scheme.

The first function is perhaps just to let individuals get the things they want — the God of Petty Thugs. The second function is to provide a sense of solidarity against external threats — the God of War. The third is to provide criteria for self-identity and the definition of innocence — the God of Oprah (or Karen Armstrong). Fourth, and finally, there is the doctrinal theology, which holds specific people to account for how they behave with respect to rules — the God of Justice (presumably what Wade has in mind).

If each of these definitions of God presuppose the one before it, then we have a right to accuse Wade of putting the cart before the horse. For his vision of cohesion must occur relatively late in the game. And it explains quite a bit wrt your comment concerning Haiti.

Sure, I agree about the first point – except that I would say it’s not a matter of a nation but of at least some of the men within it; but in any case, of course it’s not a fair test. But yes, my point was about Wade’s claim. Haiti being super-devout, it ought to be a nice illustration of his claim, and it sure doesn’t seem to be.

Wade also has the second function in mind.

Actually what he thinks comes first is music and dance, leading to ecstasy and solidarity (everyone moving together in rhythm) and contact with the gods. This is in hunter-gatherer societies, which he claims are all egalitarian (though I think he means only among the men – he doesn’t even mention gender equality). The rise of a priest class changes the game – maybe that fits your four steps better.

Anyway – it’s my view that modernity changes the whole dang thing and that he doesn’t take much account of that.

One thing about this that surprises me is that it seems to contradict Robert Wright’s claim, which he presents in a lot of plausible detail, that the religions of pre-agricultural societies do not underpin what we’d ordinarily think of as basic morality: treating each other decently; moderating impulses to violence against others in the society; acting with honesty. According to Wright, much more pragmatic considerations are enough to get people in pre-agricultural societies to do all that stuff: you have to live with the members of this small group of people, and there’s no anonymity or significant privacy. By contrast with this sort of basic morality, the gods and spirits enforce ritual conduct of various kinds that would strike us as arbitrary.

If this is the way pre-agricultural societies – the earliest ones – typically relate to the spooks that they believe in, it’s hard to see how religion could have operated in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness as an enforcer of basic intra-hunting-band social morality, the sort of morality that is needed for social survival and which it sounds like Wade is talking about. The beliefs in spooks, etc., seem more like explanatory add-ons for beings who are already social animals with tendencies to some degree of mutual sympathy and decency (which could, admittedly, break down under sufficiently extreme stress).

Wright’s book has its (large) faults – usually when he goes off into long editorial riffs about how the historical record provides evidence of a Spooky Unkown Something That Might Or Might Not Count As God Behind It All. But Wright seems pretty trustworthy when he is just synthesising anthropological and other scholarship … so I’m inclined to trust him on something like this.

But who is Wright when they are Wade in the balance? Whose scholarship is more impressive?

Oh, right on. That’s one kind of interaction ritual, which are theatrical sorts of events whose purpose is to build up emotional energy. I would associate these particular sorts of rituals with The God of Oprah. It’s a positive values-oriented sense of identity. But there are all kinds of different rituals, and some of them more Hobbesian than others. The most potent rituals beat on the “drums of war” (a useful clichee).

If there’s a “faith instinct”, it’s certainly related to plugging yourself into that emotional energy. But while faith is related to feelings, I don’t know if faith is a feeling. It’s like a placeholder or gap that people tolerate in their cognitive architecture, that they tell themselves is legitimate and to be protected, whose purpose is to partition off a space where some vague sense of guidance is allowed to leak into their brains. Usually, that guidance comes in the form of emotional energy siphoned off of the interaction rituals, but in cases of revelation it might be from intuitions and half-cocked beliefs. The latter don’t have to be quite so social, they’re more related to the experience of meditation.

So I’d be curious to hear what Wade says about those two points — anti-social solidarity, and individualistic meditation. (Hm, maybe he has a blog…!)*

* It would also be fun to compare him to Robert Wright. This seems like the sort of jibbajabba that Wright is on about.**

** Even more fun would be to compare to the Continental philosophers. They’ve been abusing these lines of thought for quite a long time.

Good point. Here’s a possible counter-point: I bet the women in Haiti are bringing any food they can get back to their families.* If Haitian women are more religious than Haitian men, then maybe the religion/cohesion correlation isn’t so far off?

*Please note: I really, really hate making the assumption that men are taking food for themselves while women are sharing. But it is in keeping with general trends of what goes on in this kind of situation in male-dominated cultures. I wish this were not so, and I don’t think it HAS to be so. I don’t think it’s an inevitable feature of male biology or anything like that.

Ultimately I don’t buy the religion/cohesion link, though. It’s not preposterous, but it doesn’t ring true from what I have observed.

Organized, hierarchical religion is now as it always has been, a tool of social control: The question is, whose hands wield that tool and to whose benefit? For the greater part, the answer seems to be “men.” Therein, I suppose, lies the difference between a tool of social control and a tool of social cohesion: Cohesion benefits everyone.

Despite your suspicions, OB, everything I’ve read suggests that the evidence of hunter-gatherer egalitarianism *does* typically include a roughly equal balance of power between genders as well as between individuals. There is always a clear division of labor – nursing children youngsters isn’t particularly conducive to hunting game – but generally speaking the division of labor also involves a division and balance of social power, and consequently such cultures display little or no misogyny (or at least much, much less than is typically evident in supposedly more “advanced” societies).

In any event, this “faith instinct” stuff presumes a substantial functional continuity from hunter-gatherer animism through to, say, modern Catholicism and Islam – a presumption that is overreaching and entirely unwarranted to begin with, and when pulled out and examined seems to fit rather poorly with the evidence. The actual organization and power structures of the societies are vastly different, the needs of individuals and groups are different, and there is no reason to assume that the functional role of religion is somehow substantially consistent across all that difference. I haven’t read Wade’s book except in synopsis, but I’ve read other versions of the same basic shtick: Although he’s methodical about it and doesn’t smuggle in as many assumptions as Wade seems to, David Sloan Wilson (in Darwin’s Cathedral) is also a bit sloppy on this difficult matter of the substantial differences amongst the various social functions “religion” (writ very large) can play. Yes, some of the basic conceptual architecture of whatever rough supernatural beliefs our ancestors first invented – and there does seem to be a certain unity of theme among hunter-gatherer spiritual traditions the world over – is the evident foundation of what religions later became. However, the much mutated and adapted social descendants of that basic conceptual architecture need not and seemingly do not play the same roles as their distant ancestor.

(And Russell, I’m not sure whether to congratulate you or excoriate you for that horrible Wright/Wade word play – which, I suppose, makes it a successful pun.)

G., those hunter-gatherer societies aren’t particularly religious, are they? At least, not with hierarchies and priests and organization. I thought they had more of an animistic worldview, but no dogma.

I thought the Wright/Wade word play was great! It’s bad puns I don’t like, and that was a good one. :- )

Russell – “you have to live with the members of this small group of people, and there’s no anonymity or significant privacy.”

Yes, and Wade does take that into account, but there’s the old ‘cheater’ problem. (I kept expecting him to cite Trivers and/or Cosmides and Tooby, and I don’t think he ever did.) He suggests that language complicates the picture by making lying possible – supernatural watchers are an attempt at blocking that move.

The thing about Wright and Wade is that both are Templeton people. Templetonians actually supervised Wade’s book – which seems like something he wouldn’t want to admit, but he does.

Ben – “I would associate these particular sorts of rituals with The God of Oprah.”

Yeah. I get a whiff of it sometimes at Folk Life – and I got a big blast of it last year watching the inauguration.

Regarding the survival of Haitians -will, I wonder, the practice of voodooism, (which grew out of animist religions, that was brought to the country by slaves, thus leading to syncretism in many places and fused together with Catholicism) take precedence –taking into account the considerable overlap between the two belief systems?

Steve, speaking of megalomanic organizations, it doesn’t help that our governments had a prominent role in the coup against Aristide. Stability isn’t possible when the international community decides it can govern whoever it wants.

Jenavir? If you think you’re expressing disagreement with me, I think perhaps you need to re-read my post. My third paragraph is all about the problem of treating hunter-gatherer animism and organized hierarchical institutions as if they were essentially the same under the overly-broad label “religion,” then drawing unwarranted conclusions based on that difference-glossing label. While I don’t think it’s quite right to say that hunter-gatherer animistic traditions have no dogma, they certainly don’t have institutionalized hierarchies and such. That’s exactly why I think more attention needs to be paid to the social functions of religious (broadly construed) belief systems and activities, and that little or nothing of great importance can be concluded from shared conceptual features such as belief in invisible supernatural agents.

It’s not merely the belief in spirits and/or gods that matters, it’s the social behaviors that follow from those beliefs that make all the difference.

G. Felis:”such cultures display little or no misogyny (or at least much, much less than is typically evident in supposedly more “advanced” societies).”

I suggest you broaden your acquaintance beyond pomo and eco-femi-fantasy novels, cobber G. I can testify that Australian indigenous and African indigenous that I have seen have both got more mysogyny in their social structures than you could wave a short stick at.

Well, ChrisPer – perhaps the status of aboriginal women – and men, for that matter – has something to do with the rather abusive colonial history (and present) that has radically reshaped indigenous hunter/gatherer traditions. Also, I don’t know that white Australians have any basis for criticizing any other culture or subculture’s gender politics, since Australia is quite possibly the most consistently sexist nation in the industrialized world. (Or do you think that pro-rape facebook groups organized by privileged white boys are an aberration or anomaly rather than just a very visible and slightly more extreme than usual symptom of cultural attitudes? If so, why?)

And for the record, what I’ve read for the most part has been ethnographic research by professional anthropologists. And as I have repeatedly criticized postmodernist claptrap in the B&W comments, I find that aspect of your insults particularly asinine.

ChrisPer, you have exhibited a repeated pattern of criticizing others’ sources of information while demonstrating that you know fuck-all about either their actual information sources or about the subject under discussion. You might wish to reconsider that approach to discussion, as it does not leave people with a positive impression of your character or intelligence. Or, more succinctly: Take your uninformed personal opinion, fold it into a shape with lots of corners, and stuff it.

“The United States of America is quite possibly the most consistently sexist nation in the industrialized world.”

It seems likely to me that I could dig out a whole lot of “evidence” for such a claim, and there are certainly some prominent sexist aspects of American culture that you won’t find, or find to such a degree, in Australia. However, I have no intention of going into what they are, because it would prove nothing about which culture is, all things considered, more sexist than the other. Nor would that be a productive debate, and not would it be very relevant to the discussion you are having about the treatment of women by men in pre-tribal hunting bands.

I don’t know Bruce Gorton from a bar of soap, and maybe he’s barking up the wrong tree. Maybe his argument stinks like a dead cat. I have no idea: I’m not an expert on indigenous cultures or anything closely related.

But, please, let’s not turn this discussion into “Your [Western] country is more sexist/patriarchal/infected by a culture of machismo/permeated by highly sexist forms of religiosity than my [Western] country.”

All countries have a lot to answer for when it comes to the treatment of women by men. Some, no doubt, much more than others – if I were a woman I’d much prefer living in either of our countries, or in France or Denmark or the UK, than in Afghanistan or Mali or Saudi Arabia – but it doesn’t do much good to make comments that merely offend people who are basically on your side and normally enjoy reading your thoughts, i.e. people like me.

You’re absolutely correct, Russell. ChrisPer’s asinine, insulting comment provoked me to respond in kind. My intent was to point out that *HE* as a white Australian shouldn’t be harping on Aboriginal sexism from his privileged perspective because his own culture has nothing to crow about in terms of gender equality – that is, he has a mote/beam problem. But the comparison of Australia to the rest of the “first world” was an unwarranted broad-brush insult that was entirely unnecessary to make my point – and in fact, mirrored one of the asinine things about the ChrisPer comment I was slapping down. I apologize for that remark.

I do not apologize for telling ChrisPer to stuff it, though. That was sincere and warranted. (Accusing me of buying into any sort of postmodernism is fightin’ words, bub.)

It’s interesting to think about how to formulate egalitarianism in an empirical way. It’s hard, maybe impossible, to be very clear about it, though there are attempts.

So I know that anthropologists have sometimes made sense of it in terms of institutional balances of power. So for instance, you might have a nominally patriarchical society, but that society may be matrilineal; in some cases, with dowry passed along the mother’s side. I suppose that men are bound to be better boyfriends if they have economic pressure to please their mother-in-law.

The division of labor has also been mentioned (above). I think we’re supposed to be referring to the qualitative content of those labors when we’re talking about the question of sexism. i.e., answered by questions like, “Do you feel valued as a member of your society given your role (as you understand it)?”. But that kind of answer doesn’t seem satisfying, because sometimes people internalize their oppression, i.e., find happiness in slavery. (They call it “habituated preference formation” in the literature on autonomy.)

And while I’m back here, I’ll respond to Bruce Gorton’s entirely un-insulting “Huh?”

While there is misogyny in every culture, including some hunter/gatherer cultures, institutionalized structures which turn all women into chattel (for example, sharia) are strongly tied to agricultural societies, whether nomadic or settled into villages or city-states or nations. In contrast, hunter-gatherer societies have a strong tendency towards egalitarianism – which does not necessarily rule out misogyny because there is also a strong tendency towards division of labor between the sexes, but on the whole the division of labor is accompanied by a division of social power as well. Rather than radically unbalanced gender power relations that are evident in many (though not all) societies with more hierarchical social structures, in hunter-gatherer societies there are distinct areas of female and male authority which are almost always somewhat balanced.

I don’t know whether ChrisPer has actually read a single shred of comparative ethnography or what sort of Australian and African tribal cultures he’s had contact with (or seen documentaries about or whatever) to base his broad-brush claim, but most hunter-gatherer cultures in most of the world have been transmuted into something else entirely in the post-colonial era and aren’t the best examples to go on. Moreover, too often so-called “primitive peoples” with their funny languages and clothes and customs tend to get lumped together even if they aren’t hunter-gatherers at all: Most tribal cultures in Africa, for example, are either settled or nomadic agricultural societies, not properly hunter-gatherers at all. Very few Australian Aborigines live traditional hunter-gatherer lives either, and it would be foolish to ignore the mutation of their customs caused by centuries of oppression and poverty: The Stolen Generations – aboriginal children taken away from their parents and culture by force and put into state-run schools – are not a matter of ancient history, since Australia was still doing that as recently as 1970ish. (Canada did effectively the same thing to their natives, and the U.S. has done and continues to do worse under the reservation system.)

The few peoples in the world still living a genuinely hunter-gatherer lifestyle – a few semi-isolated tribes in South America and the South Pacific, many (but not all) of the Khoisan peoples of southern Africa – are fairly consistent with regard to the egalitarianism and relative lack of misogyny noted above, but are (of course) distinct from each other in many other ways. But those cultures which are still primarily hunter-gatherers are even more distinct from the very changed (and often sadly broken in many ways) post-Colonial remnants of former hunter-gatherer cultures, and the latter shouldn’t be taken as any sort of socio-cultural reference or touchstone for any information about the former.

Benjamin, I recommend Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior by Christopher Boehm. I haven’t read the whole book and it was a few years back – I got kind of side-tracked by this stuff while I was doing my dissertation research, but it wasn’t directly relevant and I couldn’t spend too much time on it. Anyway, I think it’s a great place to start: Not only is the book interesting in itself (and now that I’ve been reminded of it I might have to go check it back out and finish it), it’s a great starting point for a game of follow-the-references to find out more.

GF: Thanks mate – and yeah, Hierarchy in the Forest is a good book. I have actually read it right through, but because I don’t have a lot independent knowledge of this area I can only say that it’s plausible, not that it’s accurate.

Now that’s interesting – I had a brief email exchange with Christopher Boehm last week – basically just asking him about something Nicholas Wade said about him and the Templeton Foundation in the acknowledgements of his (Wade’s) book.